Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Dagrofa’s Switch to ExaGrid Results in Quicker Backups and a Consolidated Backup Environment

Customer Overview

The Dagrofa Group, headquartered in Ringsted, Denmark, operates several chains of grocery stores, a wholesale logistics company for internal and external customers and exports, and is a supplier for professional kitchens in the hotel and restaurant industry. Dagrofa is Denmark’s third largest retail company and its largest wholesale business; employing around 16,500 employees, with annual sales of approximately DKK 20 billion.

Key Benefits:

  • Dagrofa resolves storage capacity issues by installing scalable ExaGrid system
  • Dagrofa’s daily backups 10X faster after switch to ExaGrid, due to ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam Data Mover
  • Data is easily restored from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone in just a ‘few clicks’
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Switch to ExaGrid Consolidates Backup Environment

The IT team at Dagrofa had been backing up data to a Dell EMC Data Domain system as well as smaller network-attached storage (NAS) boxes, using Veeam. As they ran out of storage space on the different devices they realized it was time for a new solution, and made a plan to consolidate the storage environment to use one product for all of the backup storage. “We spoke with our storage vendor and he recommended that we look into ExaGrid,” said Patrick Frømming, infrastructure architect at Dagrofa. “One of the key reasons we chose to switch to ExaGrid was its integration with Veeam, and were especially impressed that ExaGrid had built in Veeam’s Data Mover into its system. We’ve noticed a significant increase in the speed of our backups since we have switched to using ExaGrid with Veeam. ExaGrid is super cool technology and I’m a big fan of Veeam as well, so it’s very satisfying to me that they work so well together.”

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

"We’ve saved so much time on backup management. With our previous solution, we were always trying to move backups around to make space for new ones, but now that we use ExaGrid, our storage capacity is not an issue… "

Patrick Frømming, Infrastructure Architect

ExaGrid Speeds Up Daily Backups and Synthetic Fulls

Dagrofa has a wide variety of data to back up, including Windows data as well as SQL and Oracle databases. Frømming backs up Dagrofa’s production system data in daily incrementals and weekly synthetic fulls. “Our daily backups are ten times faster with ExaGrid than with our previous backup storage solution,” he said. “With our previous system, it used to take up to 24 hours to merge the daily incrementals from into a full backup. Since switching to ExaGrid that process takes significantly less time,” added Frømming.

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. ExaGrid is the only product on the market that offers this performance enhancement.

Restores in Just a ‘Few Clicks’

Frømming is pleased with how quickly data is restored from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone. “It only takes a few clicks to restore data from the Landing Zone. I think the Landing Zone is ExaGrid’s best feature, especially because we can start up backups as virtual machines (VMs) directly from our backup storage. I also like that the storage space is differentiated between the most recent backups in the Landing Zone, and less recent backups in the retention area, and that I can adjust the storage space between the two, on one system.”

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.

Dagrofa Easily Adds to Its ExaGrid System

Frømming was impressed with how easy it was to add another ExaGrid appliance to the system, and that it resulted in a fixed- length backup window. “Dagrofa is the parent company to three different areas of business, and shortly after installing our ExaGrid system, we decided to merge data centers with our daughter company. We started out with two spokes on our ExaGrid system and added another spoke to consolidate the backup data for the merging data centers. Our ExaGrid account manager and system engineer were very helpful in sizing our system and scaling it correctly with an additional appliance,” he said. “The advantage to this process was that we gained more processing power so that we could have simultaneous backup of different systems. We also found that our backup time was the same, despite adding many more servers to back up,” said Frømming.

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

ExaGrid Saves Time on Backup Management

“We’ve saved so much time on backup management. With our previous solution, we were always trying to move backups around to make space for new ones, but now that we use ExaGrid, our storage capacity is not an issue, in fact, we still have 39% of our retention space remaining, thanks to the great deduplication we’re getting,” said Frømming. “Now our backup management is as simple as reading our daily email from the ExaGrid system so we have a nice, fast view of our backup storage.”

Frømming values the support he receives from his ExaGrid support engineer. “Whenever there is a new release, my support engineer gets in touch to install firmware upgrades and he gets back to me quickly when I have questions about the system. I have also found that ExaGrid provides good documentation, so that if I want to try something I can easily find documentation on how to do it. There’s great support for this system.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.